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Aesthetics and Athletics: Staring at Difference in ESPN the Magazine’s “Bodies We Want” Lorin Shellenberger The author is a PhD candidate in ESPN the Magazine unveiled its October 19, 2009 issue with one of rhetoric and writing at Virginia six covers, each of a very naked to partially naked Serena Williams Tech, where she teaches first-year (tennis), Dwight Howard (basketball), Gina Carano (mixed martial composition and is currently arts), Carl Edwards (NASCAR), Sarah Reinertsen (triathlon), or the editorial assistant for the Adrian Peterson (football). ESPN called this issue “The Body minnesota review. Issue,” explaining, “The Magazine has long been fascinated by athlete’s bodies …. We think of the following pages as a celebration and an exploration of the athletic form” (2009, 49).1 Yet despite this clear intention to celebrate the athletic form, only one of these cover photos depicts an athlete in the midst of her respective sport, that of Gina Carano. Williams, Reinertsen, and Peterson are merely pictured sitting down, all with their legs drawn towards their chests, while Howard and Edwards are pictured from the waist up, with Howard crossing one arm in front of his chest and Edwards pictured in profile, flexing his bicep by holding up a tire. The cover images from the 2009 Body Issue are not the only instances of athletes photographed in such demure, almost suggestive poses. ESPN’s Body Issue consistently depicts athletes, and in particular female athletes, as objects of the gaze, reinforcing the long history of women as the surveyed. In this essay I use psychoanalytic theory, feminist film theory, and a Foucauldian analysis to argue that far from celebrating the athletic form, ESPN’s Body Issue relies on relationships of biopower that capitalize on the differences in social presence between men and women. The viewers of these images are encouraged to view the athletes as spectacles, and in particular, to view women, African Americans, and disabled athletes as exotic others. Such images invite the full extent of what Michel Foucault would call surveillance, and work to normalize the body, further making docile the already highly disciplined bodies of athletes. This analysis demonstrates not only the extent to which sport is just one other mechanism through which power operates on the body, but also argues the excessive consumption of sport-related media, particularly sport-related images, in American society Textual Overtures 2.1 | May 2014 46 further subjugates the bodies of athletes and situates the bodies of nonathletes as somehow lacking. Fig. 1-6 ESPN the Magazine cover images for the 2009 issue (top left to bottom right): Serena Williams, Dwight Howard, Gina Carano, Carl Edwards, Sarah Reinertsen, and Adrian Peterson. A Celebration of What, Exactly? When the first Body Issue was released in 2009, ESPN framed the issue as a “celebration of athletic form,” attempting to distinguish the issue from other brazen forays by sports magazines, such as Sports Illustrated’s annual Swimsuit Issue, though both publications heavily rely on ideas of spectatorship and desire in their respective viewers. Despite obvious comparisons to Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue, ESPN The Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Chad Millman claims the Body Issue was never intended to rival the Swimsuit Issue. In a 2011 interview with USA Today reporter Michael McCarthy, Millman argues the Body Issue is different from the Swimsuit Issue because the Swimsuit Issue is “not about sports and it’s not about athletes,” while the Body Issue is “only about the athletic form .... We’re not about just showing people who are buff and trying to excite the masses” (McCarthy). However, excite the masses they did. General Manager and Editorial Director Gary Hoenig told CNBC’s Darren Rovell that the 2009 Body Issue drew the most advertising in the month of October since the magazine’s 1998 launch, and 35 percent more advertising than the (non-Body) issue for the same week the previous year (Rovell). In addition, sales of the 2009 Body Issue were almost double that of other regular issues. According Textual Overtures 2.1 | May 2014 47 to Hoenig, the 2009 issue “was our biggest seller on the newsstand since the college football issue in 2007 and it’s likely in the top five best selling in the last five years” (Rovell). Though ESPN attempts to situate the Body Issues as aesthetic, artistic representations, it is clear they are also interested in producing the biggest spectacle for an excited audience. ESPN’s audience has in fact remained largely excited about the Body Issues and ESPN continues to defend the issues against their few critics by relying on an idealized “natural” aesthetic for both men and women. ESPN staff writer Leslie Goldman supports the 2011 Body Issue by claiming: Unlike other shall-remain-nameless sports magazines that annually feature (for no apparent reason) naked or near- naked non-athlete women posing in G-strings and body paint2, the Body Issue showcases athletes themselves. The images highlight their accomplishments on and off the field and capture their strength in a beautiful, respectful way. A diverse rainbow of body types are featured, from 5-foot-1 Sacramone to 6-foot-1 Fowles. (Men are featured, too, so one could argue it’s—at the very least—equal-opportunity exploitation.) (Goldman) But exploitation might be quite fitting here, as ESPN photographer Nancy Weisman, who shot Venus Williams, Philippa Raschker, Amare Stoudemire, and Diana Taurasi for the 2010 issue, reflects on the shoot in an online feature called “Body Blurbs.” Referring to the photo shoot with Venus Williams, Weisman says, “We were told upfront that Venus would not get nude. Nor would she take off her top like Serena did last year. Before I left for the shoot I was urged by our editor-in-chief, ‘Get her naked Nancy.’ Maybe I’m losing my touch because she stood firm” (Weisman). Despite its claim to celebrate the athletic form in a “respectful” way, Weisman was clearly directed to convince Venus Williams to go against Williams’s prior expressed wishes. Apparently ESPN is fine with celebrating the athletic form in all of its diversity, so long as that diversity is naked: Venus Williams was not featured in the main photographic portfolio for the 2010 issue, and every woman featured in that portfolio was completely nude, compared to only five completely nude female athletes of the 10 featured in 2009.3 And since the inaugural 2009 issue, every athlete featured is completely nude. Textual Overtures 2.1 | May 2014 48 Fig. 7 A non-naked Venus Williams. This image appeared in the first few pages of the magazine, not in the main portfolio. In addition, though Goldman claims the magazine celebrates “athletes themselves,” the context in which many of the athletes are featured is hardly representative of their athletic accomplishments. For example, many of the athletes, male and female, are pictured with no reference to their respective sports. Surfer Stephanie Gilmore, who appears in the 2011 issue, is shown reclining on a red lounge chair, and in the same issue, football player Steven Jackson is featured standing on top of a cement structure that looks more like a high dive than an end zone. Furthermore, all of the women featured in the Body Issues have had their hair and makeup done before the shoot, appearing much differently than they might for athletic competition. Olympic track and field athlete Lolo Jones, for example, has her hair curled and falling loosely and no glasses in her ESPN photos, while she often competes with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and wearing sports glasses. The deceiving depiction of these athletes only further inscribes them as objects of desire and situates them as Other from the viewer. Fig. 8-10 Clockwise from top right: Lolo Jones, Stephen Jackson, and Stephanie Gilmore. Textual Overtures 2.1 | May 2014 49 “Bodies We Want”: Athletes as Objects of Desire From its inception, ESPN’s Body Issue has relied on the objectification of its featured athletes and the spectatorship and associated desire viewers bring to the images. ESPN opened the central photographic portfolio of their inaugural 2009 Body Issue by claiming, “The best bodies in sports grab us because they can accomplish things we can only imagine. In all their shapes and sizes, they are, quite simply … bodies we want” (2009, 50, emphasis mine). In this introduction the athletes included in the issue are referred to as merely bodies—their identities as athletes are stripped, and their ability to garner attention is explained only as a result of their bodies, as if their athletic accomplishments are exclusively due to some bodily abnormality and not because of hours of training. Feminist visual studies scholars Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright explain that photographs in particular work to situate a difference between viewer and subject. According to Sturken and Cartwright, photographs are “a medium through which that which is defined as other is posited as that which is not the norm or the primary subject” (106). The ESPN Body Issues draw attention to the athlete as other, establishing an explicit difference between the imaged athletes and the viewers of their images, which in turn situates the viewer as lacking. In fact, the phrase “Bodies We Want” immediately hails the viewer into a particular sort of response to these images, that of desire, and this phrase would become the title or catchphrase for the featured photographic spread in each of the Body Issues, continually reinforcing ideas of desire and lack. Sturken and Cartwright argue the act of looking produces a sense of oneself in the person who looks, both in the eyes of him or herself and of others, and also in relation to natural and cultural contexts that make up the field of the gaze (103).

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